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Sunday, February 26, 1911: I went to Sunday school this afternoon and staid for church and catechize. The walking was extremely bad, but still I went. We had chocolate ice cream for supper. We all rather like it, so we have it occasionally which is about once in a week.

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

I’m amazing how often the Muffly family had ice cream. This is the fifth time they’ve made it since the diary began on January 1–ice cream was previously mentioned on January 22, February 8 (and it was banana ice cream on the 8th! I’m amazed that bananas were available in rural Pennsylvania), February 12, and February 23.

A century ago ice cream freezers were the new-fangled thing—and with the ready availability of ice during the winter months, ice cream made the perfect dainty winter dessert. (A hundred years ago, young people preferred lighter foods which they called dainty foods.)

I found directions for making ice cream in an old cookbook that was published in 1911.

Chocolate Ice Cream—Use the vanilla recipe, adding four ounces of grated chocolate to the milk before scalding and using a couple ounces more sugar than for the vanilla cream.

Vanilla Ice Cream—Add to one egg slightly beaten one sup of sugar, one tablespoon of flour, and a speck of salt. Pour on one pint of scalding milk and cook for twenty-five minutes in a double boiler. When cool, add vanilla and one pint of thin cream.

Fresh Fruit Ice Creams—Prepare fruit by sprinkling sugar. Let it stand one hour, press through a sieve, and stir into ice cream when the cream is frozen to a mush. All fruit ice creams are made in substantially the same way, but where seed fruits, such as currants, are used, the carefully strained juice only must be added. This can be put in the freezer with the cream and not reserved until later, as in the case of the mashed fruits. Grated pineapple, with the addition of a little lemon juice, makes a particularly fine fruit cream.

Hello

I look forward to sharing my grandmother's diary with relatives and friends. Helena Muffly (Swartz) kept a diary from 1911-1914. She was 15 years old when she began this diary. I plan to post these entries one day at a time—exactly 100 years after she wrote them. I hope you enjoy this glimpse back to a slower paced time.

The header is a picture of the farm where my grandmother lived when she wrote this diary. It is located in Northumberland County in central Pennsyvlania about a mile outside of McEwenvsille. My father said that the buildings look similar to what they looked like when he was a child.